Dressing for England

Fashion and Nationalism in Victorian Novels

Amy L. Montz

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9798855804799, 9798855804782
• eBook ISBN: 9798855804805
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Englische Literaturkritik

Illuminates the interplay of gender, fashion, and nationalism in Victorian literature and culture.

Dressing for England argues that women's interest in fashionable clothing—in dress that appealed to a sophisticated, cultured, and continental society—was viewed in two ways in nineteenth-century England: as a superficial feminine habit, on the one hand, and, on the other, as a dangerous tool women used to control how they were perceived. Dress could be a means of not only conveying extravagance or beauty but also influencing society at home and expressing Englishness aboard. Victorian women turned the world of fashion into an arena of feminine power. Reading well-known novels by Gaskell, Thackeray, and Eliot alongside clothing and cultural ephemera, Dressing for England shows how evolving fashions—shawls, crinolines, turbans, corsets, hats—reflected shifting notions of class, gender, and Empire and enabled women to shape both their own identities and national consciousness.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Ladies’ Business, Feminine Weakness, Fashionable Dress
• Chapter One “That Wicked Paris”: Elizabeth Gaskell Fashions the Good Englishwoman
• Chapter Two William Thackeray’s Fashionable Humbugs and Unfashionable Darlings: Consuming National Distinctions of Dress
• Chapter Three “The Will and Pleasure of Women”: The Feminine Love of Fashion in George Eliot’s Middlemarch
• Chapter Four “Now She’s All Hat and Ideas”: Fashioning the British Suffrage Movement
• Conclusion To Have and to Wear: National Distinctions of Dress in Royal Weddings
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover